Job Definition

This part shows you how to define a cron job in Plan. One job takes the following parameters task, every, at, path, environment and output, you can have a look at Job for more details. Here is one example:

from plan import Job

job = Job('ruby script.rb', every='1.month', at='day.5',
                        path='/web/scripts', output='null',
                        environment={'RAILS_ENV': 'production'})

Every

Every is used to define how often the job runs. It takes the following values:

[1-60].minute
[1-24].hour
[1-31].day
[1-12].month
jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec
and all of those full month names(case insensitive)
sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday
weekday, weekend (case insensitive)
[1].year

There might be some cron time intervals that you cannot describe with Plan because of the limited supported syntax. No worries, every takes raw cron syntax time definition, and in this case, your at value will be ignored. For example, I can do something like this:

job = Job('demo', every='1,2 5,6 * * 3,4')

Also, every can be special predefined values, and in this case, your at value will be ignored too, they are:

"yearly"    # Run once a year at midnight on the morning of January 1
"monthly"   # Run once a month at midnight on the morning of the first day
            # of the month
"weekly"    # Run once a week at midnight on Sunday morning
"daily"     # Run once a day at midnight
"hourly"    # Run once an hour at the beginning of the hour
"reboot"    # Run at startup

At

At value is used to define when the job runs. It takes the following values:

minute.[0-59]
hour.[0-23]
hour:minute
day.[1-31]
sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday
weekday, weekend (case insensitive)

How about multiple at values, you can do that by using one space to seperate multiple values, for example I want to run one job every day at 12:15 and 12:45, I can define it like this:

job = Job('onejob', every='1.day', at='hour.12 minute.15 minute.45')
# or even better
job = Job('onejob', every='1.day', at='12:15 12:45')

Path

The path you want to change to before the task is executed, defaults to the current working directory. For job types that do not need one path, this will be ignored, for example, CommandJob.

Environment

The bash environment you want to run the task on. You should use one Python dictionary to define your environment key values pairs.

Output

The output redirection for the task. It takes following values:

"null"
any raw output string
one dictionary to define your stdout and stderr

For example:

job = Job('job', every='1.day', output='null')
job = Job('job', every='1.day', output='> /tmp/stdout.log 2> /tmp/stderr.log')
job = Job('job', every='1.day', output=
            dict(stdout='/tmp/stdout.log', stderr='/tmp/stderr.log'))